Stadium of the Future

The New Kuip, permeable from all sides yet covered from above, contributes to the city a protected plaza, where everything can take place. In contrary to current examples of stadiums which exploit mainly the peripheral functional volumes for supporting public and commercial functions on a nomatch day, the future stadiums explores the potential of adapting the arena for introducing various functions and events that provides the platform for everyday urban activity. Considering the fact that a stadium of 65.000 people is infrequently used for hosting football matches, filling up the functional time line in order to generate revenue and blend the colossal structure in the urban fabric is one of the biggest challenges faced.

The textile wrapping of the building is a unifying gesture for the functions such as hotel, community school, sports education centre, medical facilities, commercial hospitality and entertainment functions and all the supporting stadium utilities for a football match. The intense use of peripheral spaces is achieved by adaptable re configuration of functions with similar functional volumes e.g. VIP boxes can convert to Hotel rooms, the FIFA meeting rooms to school classrooms, and the press and media rooms to supporting areas of the conference centre, quickly and without requiring excess effort.
The materialization of facade and roof and the roof structure was result of the demand to merge the building in surrounding instead of making a ‘Big white elephant’ in the urban fabric. The most logical step to reduce the building height was to go for the anticlastic tensile roof structure from which the roof fabric skin was suspended. The modulations of wrapping of the skin was result of the light studies done using Ecotect.

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Status: Competition EntryLocation: Rotterdam, NLMy Role: This group project was performed in collaboration with E. Calle, P.Sakkas, T. Bristogiannis. I was responsible for initial Architectural conceptualization along with all other group members and the structural design of the building.